How long have we been talking about “learning in the moment of need?” It seems like forever to me. One of my favorite quotes is from MIT professor Seymour Papert. He said, “You can’t teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know when they need to know it.”
The good news is that organizations have the ability right now to deliver moment-of-need learning through mobile performance support. The bad news is, not many are doing it.
But you can quickly get ahead of the curve by attending Brandon Hall Group’s Sept. 5 webinar, Why Performance Support Should Be Your First Mobile Initiative, featuring Xyleme CEO Mark Helllinger and me.
Brandon Hall Group’s recent Mobile Learning Survey found that more than 40% of organizations provide no mobile performance support to their employees. And this does not include companies that do no mobile learning at all. This is among organizations that say they are doing mobile learning. The question becomes, why aren’t they doing it? It’s not because it doesn’t work. In our survey, only 4% of respondents delivering mobile performance support said that it is not at all effective. Nearly two-thirds said that it is either very or extremely effective.
Clearly, those organizations that have started to deliver mobile learning, yet ignore the potential of performance support, are leaving a lot on the table.
One of the big problems is that organizations are still looking at mobile learning as the process of squeezing their LMS onto a smartphone. It is simply the wrong strategy. Mobile learning is something new and different with a whole new set of features and functions that need to be leveraged. Performance support is a great place to start.
